Watching Gone With The Wind

The nostalgic opening shot.  The sun is setting as an old-fashioned overture score sweeps away our imaginations.

“Yet after all these years, GWTW remains a towering landmark of film, because it tells a good story, and it tells it wonderfully well.” – Roger Ebert

I grew up enthused about the Civil War.  As a kid, I played out battles with my friends, watched everything I could find on just four channels of TV about the war, read what books I could understand on the subject at that very young age.  I can remember my mother looking at me one day when I was maybe 8 0r 9 and saying: “You’ve never seen Gone With The Wind.  Your daddy and I should to take you.”  Naturally, I asked what it was about.  “The Civil War” was all I heard.  I was ecstatic.  And my parents, no doubt to my father’s chagrin, took me to the local drive-in to watch the four-hour movie.

I was disappointed.  It was barely about the war at all.  There were hardly any Yankees and the Rebels were all scraggly and wounded.  There wasn’t a single battle fought the whole time and everybody was making such a fuss about the young lady who seemed pretty enough but acted too big for her britches.  That was my first impression of Gone With The Wind.  

Years later, I saw it again in high school.  A girl I used to date was enthralled with the strong-willed Scarlett O’Hara.  She was an inspiration to my former girlfriend who admired her independence above everything.  A bunch of us got together to watch when it appeared (a premiere, I believe) on television.  Once again, I got rather bored with it all.  But I survived it, understanding very little of what all the fuss was about.

Scarlett and Rhett dance at the pre-war ball decorated with early secessionist memorabilia.  A portrait of Jefferson Davis looks down from the left. The soldiers on the right all feature different uniforms, which authentically indicates the absurd pageantry early in the war.  This was all wonderful to behold to audiences in 1939 and it still works today.

In college I saw it again and was able to appreciate it more fully for the first time.  I realized the film was the quintessential epic motion picture.  Grand and entertaining on a scale of other films of its day and time like The Ten Commandments.  Yet, these films seem ostentatious today.  They fail to successfully weave their epic narratives with a complex tapestry of human emotion over a range of characters whose relatable interplay of passions makes Gone With The Wind so distinctive.

Recently, Jennifer and I sat down and watched the film again, the first time I’ve watched it in almost 40 years.  Of course, it is a film of its time.  Audiences in 1939 expected films to be more like stage plays.  This means that the melodrama is often over the top, the acting routinely stiff in a manner that seems quaint or cliché today.  

You have to forgive that and appreciate the film on its own terms.  Audiences were enthralled with Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh in 1939 and for decades afterwards.  It was a wildly popular film and continued to be through many repeated releases into the 1990’s.  Even today, if you can look past the sometimes overplayed hands, the chemistry between the two lead actors is captivating.  The story itself is majestic, glorious and frequently quite humorous.

The film is laced with all forms of humor.  One of the lady pillars of antebellum etiquette has suddenly fainted.  She was just complaining about almost fainting at another matter, when Scarlett, who is in mourning of all things (!), agrees to dance with that scoundrel from Charleston, Rhett Butler.  It is just all too much!   

By humor I don’t mean any of several comical lines of dialog that sparkle throughout the film.  (There are some real zingers.)  Rather, I mean that you should consider the fact that the sexiest woman in the film ends up married twice to ridiculous men, neither of which she really wanted, both of whom die thus forcing her to wear black and be in “mourning” when all she wants to do is have a good time.  Meanwhile, the most handsome wealthy scoundrel of a character courts her throughout the whole thing.  He abruptly proposes, not wanting to miss the opportunity to “catch her between husbands.” 

The complex relationship between Rhett and Scarlett is one of equal terms.  She strings him along; calls him “ill-bred” and slaps his face, among other things.  But her inherent sexuality, independence, and charm keep the rascal coming back for more.  For her part, she finds Rhett simultaneously attractive, even necessary, and revolting.  This leads to a highly volatile relationship that used to be quite rare in cinema.  Even the complexity of Casablanca seems like child’s play compared with the Rhett-Scarlett relationship.

The seemingly happy-go-lucky Rhett sums it up nicely with the line: “Yes, you're right, my dear. I'm not in love with you any more than you are with me. Heaven help the man who ever really loves you. What kind of a ring would you like, my darling?”

In fact Rhett succinctly sums up a lot of things throughout the film.  From the beginning of the war: “All we have are cotton and slaves and arrogance.”  To the famous conclusion: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  He is an ever-smiling, no-nonsense man of wealth, the perfect foil for the ambitious and passionate Scarlett.  She, in turn, is the splendid anecdote to his ever-smiling face.  She is the one thing his money can’t buy.  Her permutations between flirting with him and screaming at him keep him as off balance as he does her.  In fact, what makes the relationship so interesting and unique is not the fact they balance one another so much as they keep one another off-balance.

Although it is unfashionable these days, it nevertheless should be recognized that Gone With The Wind was a progressive film for its time.  Our inability to see that is just as inexcusable as our inability to look past the style of acting which was common in its day.  The film’s enormous success meant its robust contingent of black cast members received more exposure to the American public than any film up to then or for awhile thereafter.  

Gone With The Wind is inconceivable without Hattie McDaniel's protrayal of Mammy.  McDaniel held her own in scenes with Gable and Leigh and carried a great deal of the story in her character. 

Hattie McDaniel’s performance as Mammy carries a great deal of the story’s weight.  She provides just as much entertainment value as anyone in the film.  Her sassy performance is one of its shining memories and always a fresh change of pace to the melodrama.  She became the first black actress to win an Academy Award which is indicative of how progressive Hollywood was in 1939.  

That might not seem like much of an accomplishment by today’s standards but, nevertheless, it is a fact that the film is a milestone in the public acceptance of blacks in cinema.  But, no matter the issue, yesterday’s progressiveness becomes today’s transgression.  This film deserves to be considered for what it attempted to accomplish, not for what frustrated and self-righteous post-modernity impinges upon it.

A truly grand shot.  This is a extended pull-away shot beginning with a close-up of Scarlett then slowly, continuously up and away to reveal endless rows of Confederate wounded in Atlanta.  The shot ends with the Confederate battle flag in the foreground.  Almost the most complex shot in the film. 

Another truly epic shot.  A massive fire silhouetting Rhett (pulling) and Scarlett (stirring).  Human emotion is both trivialized by the grander disaster and yet the fires also represent the passion for life at the heart of these two characters.  This is my vote for most complex shot in the film.  The set that is burning is from the 1933 film King Kong.

Finally, it is important to recognize what Gone With The Wind says about the human experience of Time.  The whole film is about a glamorous, if tainted, image of the Antebellum South, that aberration of pre-industrial and capitalistic America that was the last remnant of culture from the 18th century.  It is true that the chivalry depicted in the film has been sanitized of its darker aspects.  But it is also true that “honor” was (and still is to some degree) a distinctively southern feature in America.  

Southern honor was based in large part upon wealth but even more so upon character.  Not upon business success but upon agrarian values that were the cornerstone of Jeffersonian America, an America that never happened and was never really possible as things turned out. Honor of an ideal that was more myth than fact.  Gone With The Wind is a romantic celebration of this ideal even if it is an illusion. 

The on-screen magnetism of Gable and Leigh is a primary reason the film so readily draws you in to its world.

Then there is Time as experienced on the human scale, in this case Scarlett, who constantly puts off even minor troubles and decisions until tomorrow.  Because, “after all, tomorrow is another day.”  She puts things off until tomorrow from the first scene all the way through the film and each time she does her life gets a little more desperate. 

Her means in the film range from regal to impoverished to even more regal.  The film inspires that American ideal of self-reliant success, of not letting life get you down.  Scarlett is the epitome of resilience.  She keeps coming back. In the end, when Rhett famously doesn’t “give a damn” anymore, she comes back to Tara.  She finds strength and hope in her sense of “home.”

Scarlett, in red of course, isolated in magnificent elegance on the grand staircase near the end of the film.

Coincidentally, another girl in another movie from 1939, The Wizard of Oz, discovered “there’s no place like home.”  Apparently, Americans then found commonality in a sense of home, home after the tragedy is over.  In any case, to watch Gone With The Wind is to experience that stirring musical score as it supports one of the film’s many wonderful silhouetted “heroic” shots, the final shot in this case.  Scarlett is alone again but she is also home again, the source of her strength.

The film has survived as a meme into this century.  But, back then, Tara was a lost dream of the time when their grandparents were children.  We were that close to it then and we can, if we choose, be that close to it today.  It is a sentimental nostalgia that rings true with films like, to flip the coin, Casablanca.  While not an epic film, Bogart and Bergman equate pretty well nostalgia-wise with Gable and Leigh.  

In Gone With The Wind, Scarlett is left all alone against the world when tomorrow arrives.  I get why my ex-girlfriend was inspired by her back in the 1970’s.  At the time, no other female character in cinema possessed the beauty, elegance, charm and bratty strength of Scarlett.  She was and is a survivor.  And that kind of story is more relevant now than ever.

The closing shot.  Tara is in the distance.  The film uses several of these silhouetted type shots to establish and convey a sense of grandeur that seems quaintly romantic today but is, nevertheless, effective.